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December 11th, 2020 
Awake Goy Our parshah tells the undoing of the crime that had shattered Jacob’s family. Joseph’s brothers had seethed at Jacob’s undisguised preference for Rachel as his wife. Then they were hurt and infuriated by Jacob’s manifest favoritism for Rachel’s firstborn. Their anger turned into hatred when Joseph boasted of recurring divine signals that he would lord it over them in the future. When Jacob sent Joseph to visit the brothers, away herding the family sheep, they determined to kill him. At the last minute, Judah — Joseph’s chief rival for leadership of the family — persuaded them instead to sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt. Joseph’s disappearance devastated Jacob’s life. The cover-up of the crime locked the family into a prison of silence, guilt and alienation from each other — as they watched their father’s endless grief and self-recrimination. Why had he sent Joseph alone? They were helpless to comfort him and unable to tell the truth.
Joseph survived the shocking plunge from pampered, favorite child to the dregs of slavery under a foreign master. He drew upon inner resources to become enterprising enough to rise to important positions in his master’s household and tough enough to endure sexual harassment and betrayal by his master’s wife. This was followed by unjust demotion and imprisonment — but he was not broken. In prison, he made himself so useful as to be repeatedly promoted. Then in a lightning turn around, he was brought to Pharoah to interpret the royal dreams which the Egyptian magicians and wise men failed to do. He not only correctly diagnosed a coming famine — but came up with a plan to prevent starvation . Appointed chief administrator, he presided over a massive grain collection, successfully enabling the Egyptians to feed their people and all the neighboring nations.
We marvel at the internal conviction that God had chosen him to be Egypt’s savior that enabled Joseph to climb to dizzying heights, without losing his way or having his head turned.(Genesis 45:5-8) In only one way is Joseph damaged. He rejected his family and walled off his past — even his loving father — completely. This is my interpretation of the fact that he never sent a message to Canaan or even tried to reconnect to his father — not even during the seven years when he was the vizier and second in command in Egypt. Nor did he reach out to help his family in the initial years of the consuming famine.
Clearly Jacob’s family was hopelessly fractured. Yet there is a surprise ending. Joseph meets the brothers who came to buy food for their hungry households. Joseph feels no pity or longing for them. He toys with them — really torments them. I estimate that he really did want to see his now grown up, only full brother, Benjamin, from whom he was violently separated. But he has no plan to reconcile with his brothers. They are dead, as far as he is concerned. As he said when he named his first son, Menashe, “God has made me [helped me] forget all my toil — and all my father’s house.” (Genesis 41:51). He plans to see Benjamin and then let them all go out of his life forever. To his surprise, Benjamin evokes a storm of emotion in him. He weeps secretly. Maybe this accounts for his improvisation — to frame Benjamin for a crime and keep him in Egypt.
Now comes the unexpected denouement. Judah approaches him directly and finds the one key that unlocks Joseph’s hardened heart. He communicates Jacob’s neverending heartbreak at his missing beloved son. He offers to become a slave in Benjamin’s place. That is to say, far from reacting violently to Jacob’s total possessive love for Rachel’s youngest son, Judah will give up his own life in order not to break his father’s heart again.
Joseph’s blocking wall crumbled. He is flooded with yearning and nostalgia for the father who loved him more than life. He also sees in a moment of clarity that his brother’s hateful and cruel action made possible his growing up to become a great leader. Surviving the rejection moved him from a self-centered narcissist to a person who is fulfilled by being an instrument of God’s plan to rescue Egypt from famine — and save his family from extinction. Joseph, moved to the core, reaches out to his father and family. He brings them down to Egypt and nurtures them lovingly through the famine and its aftermath. This is the inspiring story of the miraculous reuniting of Jacob’s broken family and the restoration of its wholeness.
The story is almost too good to be true. The haftorah — this week’s prophetic reading — tells us the sad reality that there was not a happy ending. The competition continued below the surface. See Jacob’s very mixed blessings and curses on the different sons and note the brothers’ concern after Jacob’s death that Joseph would now take revenge. [Genesis 49, 50:15-26].
The haftorah — this week’s prophetic reading — tells us the sad reality that there was not a happy ending.
When the children of Israel took possession of Canaan, the various tribal rivalries returned. In particular, the tribes of Ephraim and Judah dueled for supremacy. Saul, the very first King of Israel, came from the tribe of Ephraim and the Judeans were somewhat distanced from him. David, Saul’s son-in-law, came from the tribe of Judah. His success — and the Judeans’ obvious attachment to him — drove Saul and family into paranoia. Saul turned on David, convinced that David was trying to usurp the throne.
David and Solomon managed to keep the Kingdom united, despite the alienation of the tribe of Ephraim and its allies. Under Solomon’s son, Rechavam, who was a rigid and weak ruler, the nation split into two states — the Kingdom of Israel (compromising most of the Ten Tribes) and the Kingdom of Judah (mostly Judah, Benjamin and part of the Levi tribe). The Kingdoms competed religiously to keep the loyalty of their citizens. This included Israel’s creation of two worship centers in Beit El and Dan and the fashioning of two Golden Calves in Beit El intended to keep the Israelites from going to Jerusalem for their communal religious worship. Sadly, there were neither rulers great enough nor prophets successful enough to reunite the two kingdoms.
The Kingdom of Israel seems to have been more unstable with many coups by generals upending Kingships. We know now from archeology that the Kingdom of Israel was larger. During many decades, it was the dominant power in the area, with Judah as its satellite. All this came to a crashing end when Assyria, the new imperial power in the Middle East, invaded and conquered Israel. As was the general Assyrian policy, the conquerors sent the people into exile and brought in other ethnic groups in their place. Tragically, the ten tribes assimilated and were lost to Jewish history.
One hundred and thirty years later, Babylonia, the new imperial power conquered Judah and exiled many of its people. But Judah had undergone repeated religious renewals and prophetic deepening of its religious culture. The Judeans were able to survive the exile and maintain their religious identity intact. After Babylonia was overthrown by the Persians and Medes, the Judeans returned to the homeland. Part of the Judeans’ successful coping with exile and destruction was the religious deepening and revival in response to the destruction of Israel and the arrival of a large group of Israel’s most religious citizens as refugees to the Kingdom of Judah. However, the lack of religious interaction with Judah over the course of centuries left the Israelites weaker in religion and covenantal identity. This led to their assimilation and disappearance.
The Haftorah of Vayigash is a vision of Ezekiel — prophesying in Babylon more than a century after the disappearance of the Kingdom of Israel. He is instructed to take one stick and write on it “for Judah — and the tribe’s companions.” On another stick, he writes “for Ephraim and the tribes of Israel.” The Lord promises to unite the sticks into one — representing the reunited and restored people of Israel. The haftorah is heartbreaking because you realize the nostalgia and yearning behind the Rabbis’ choice of this prophetic portion. Unlike Judah in our parshah, there was no political leader or prophet, over the centuries, to approach the two kingdoms and speak the unifying words of faith and reconciliation that could have saved Israel (or, at least, assured the survival in exile of its people). By Ezekiel’s time, the ten tribes were hopelessly lost but the prophet articulates the longing for reunion and profound regret at all the missed opportunities to unite the two main centers of Jewry. This could have prevented the loss of either of them.
This is the message of Vayigash and its Haftorah for our time. Again there are two major centers of Jewry in the world — in Israel and Diaspora. Again after a century of solidarity and mutual aid, there is the splintering effect of political differences, geographic distance and religious/cultural divergence. Many sit with folded hands and say fatalistically that the sociological and cultural trends will run their course and there is nothing we can do. This week’s parshah and haftorah constitute a warning not to repeat the errors of the past. We need to mount a major effort to link Israel and Diaspora Jews in a new consciousness of our deeper unity. This includes more learning with and from each other.
In this connection, I want to mention and praise a project, Our Common Destiny Forum (https://ourcommondestiny.org). This project is primarily sponsored by Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin and the Genesis Philanthropy Group. The project is dedicated to bringing Jeiwsh communities together by focusing on the values we hold in common. In 2019, it launched an eloquent Declaration of Our Common Destiny, articulating the core principles that have connected the Jewish people for millennia. The document was completed by crowdsourcing and over 130,000 Jews worldwide have given input. I urge you to go to the website and read the document or give your own input. On December 17, the document will be celebrated online with President Rivlin under the title “Illuminate: A Global Jewish Unity Event.” Genesis Philanthropy is a project by Mikhail Fridman, a Russian Jew who has proposed creating an upper chamber for Israel’s Knesset — a kind of House of Lords — with representatives of world Jewry to input Diaspora Jewish concerns to Israel’s governing systems. There are many problems in this suggestion but it deserves major attention. Some structure is needed to assure that Israel’s governments have a real connection to Diaspora Jewry and its needs.
We need to go further to expanded programs of direct contact between Diaspora Jews and Israelis. The classic programs are Taglit/birthright israel which brings 50,000 young Jews annually to Israel for a free ten day intensive educational trip and MASA that enables a more extended stay and study program in Israel. These programs are building a reservoir of Jews who have encountered Israel first hand. Studies show Diaspora participants develop relationships with Israelis and attachment to Israel so they can process divergence and conflict yet remain deeply attached.
Charles Bronfman and Irina Nevzlin have announced the formation of Enter: The Jewish Peoplehood Alliance. This program will focus more on digital connections. It will try to engage Israelis more and to raise Jewish peoplehood’s salience in Israeli education.
My primary recommendation is to break the haredi dominance in Israel’s Knesset system. Their exclusion of the liberal religious movements and denial at their legitimacy drives away Diaspora Jews. The haredim justify their monopoly claiming it is needed to preserve the unity of the Jewish people. But there can be no unity without true recognition of the pluralism and diversity which is dominant in Diaspora Jewry. World Jewry also must make a major investment in liberal, open Orthodoxy — the only force that can challenge haredim on their halachic turf and open the door to pluralist Israeli government policies.
The famous dictum is that those who do not learn from history are condemned to relive it. We need to make a massive investment in connecting Israel and Diaspora Jewry, lest we end up losing one Jewish center which would profoundly weaken the other. We need our Judah leadership to speak the right words and focus on the right projects to keep Jewry — in both its centers — as one people bound by fate and by choice and sustaining each other.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg is president of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life, which soon will become a division of the Hadar Institute.
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